Yesterday was not fun.

[unixronin]

We took a pretty ugly power hit last night (the UPS saved the machines, but I'm now getting a constant low-bettery warning from it -- I think I REALLY need to replace the UPS batteries now), and no sooner did we recover from that than the phone went down.  Then came back up for a few minutes, then went down again, and stayed down.  Sprint just got done fixing it; they seem to be gradually replacing the 40-year-old dry cable between Belvoir and Greenville in chunks a couple of miles at a time, and each time they replace a chunk, our connection gets a bit better.  (The last partial-replacement seems to have kicked our maximum attainable data rate up from 16400bps up to about 24000bps.)  Right now, though, every time it rains hard, water gets into one of the remaining chunks of old cable, and the phone link between Belvoir and Greenville shits itself.

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Update:  After finally having hunted down a working speed test, indicatons are that we're currently getting .... wait for it .... around 6.3 kilobits per second.

Yeah, you read that right.

Comments

[radarrider.livejournal.com]

I remember a few years back when I didn't have DSL and relied on dialup. With an el cheapo 56k internal modem (Viking Components, used the Lucent chipset and the Lucent reference driver) I maxed out at 48kbps. Then, one day, I was getting 53.3kbps, the fastest actual speed you could get at the time (dunno if that's changed). I'm guessing that it happened because they upgraded the lines in order to, among other things, add DSL capability to my neighborhood. Not long after that, I got DSL and I'll never go back if I can help it.

[anda.livejournal.com]

Hasn't changed.

I'm never going back either.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

We miss our SDSL very very badly. We'd go back even to ADSL in a heartbeat, if we could GET it. Hell, even ISDN would be an improvement, if we could get it Centrex (otherwise the per-minute connection rate would bankrupt us).